Portrait of the artist's wife Anna Maria Aloisna Rosa Ferri, daughter of Pietro Ferri, half-length, in a yellow dress with a red fur-lined cloak, with a white headdress and wearing a necklace with a pendant, leaning on a ledge

Robert Fagan was born in London, the son of a baker from Cork. Admitted to the schools of the Royal Academy in 1781, where he studied under Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815), he visited Rome for the first time in 1781, returning to England the following year. He returned to Italy in 1784, where he was to remain for the rest of his life, becoming a prominent figure among the British and Irish community of artists then in Rome. In Rome he established himself as a fashionable portrait painter working in a neo-classical style similar to that of François-Xavier Fabre (1766-1837) and Hugh Douglas Hamilton (1740-1808), as well as executing history paintings. His sitters included members of the British aristocracy who visited Italy including Lady Clifford, Lady Clarendon, Lady Mainwaring and Elizabeth Lady Webster, later Lady Holland. Aside from his work as an artist, Fagan worked as a dealer in antiquities and Old Master paintings, and also as an agent for some of the important English Grand Tourists, such as Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, taking advantage of the sales from Roman aristocratic collections that occurred as a result of Napoleon's invasion of the Papal States in June 1796. Among the works of art that he managed to acquire were the celebrated pair of classical landscapes by Claude owned by Prince Altieri which he acquired for 10,000 scudi (approximately £2,250) smuggled out of Rome and sold to William Beckford for £6,825 (National Trust, Anglessey Abbey). Fagan was also a committed and successful archaeologist conducting excavations at Gabii (1792) with Gavin Hamilton; Campo Iemini, Laurentum (1794-6), with Sir Corbet Corbet and Prince Augustus Frederick; Via Appia and Rocca di Papa (1794); and Ostia where he was responsible for the discovery of the first Mithraeum and the Imperial Palace. Fagan moved from Rome to Palermo in 1807 having upset the occupying French administration with his political activities, and in 1809 he was made British Consul-General for Sicily and Malta. In Sicily he continued his interest in archaeology and carried out excavations at Tindari and Selinunte. In his latter years Fagan was dogged by financial pressures, many of which were the direct result of the French occupation, which eventually led to his suicide in 1816.

This particularly sensitive portrait shows his beautiful first wife Anna Maria Aloisia Rosa Ferri, daughter of Pietro Ferri, whom Fagan had married in Rome on 12th of April 1790, when she was seventeen years old. Phillipina, Lady Knight remarked that Fagan had changed his faith to marry 'the daughter of C. Ritson's valet de chambre' but it appears that her father worked for Cardinal Rezzonico who is recorded as her godfather at her baptism in 1773. Fagan and his wife settled in an apartment in Palazzo Piombino Carafa, in the Via del Babuino, where their only child Estina, who was to marry William Baker of Bayfordbury in 1809, was born in 1792. Fagan was obliged to leave Rome in 1797 following the French invasion of Northern Italy but the couple were soon to return and following the successful sale of the Altieri Claudes they set up home in the Piazza di Spagna where Anna Maria died in 1800 aged only twenty-six. Within six weeks of her death Fagan married Maria Ludovica Flajani, with whom he portrayed himself in a self-portrait now in the Hunt Museum, Limerick.

An unfinished version of this portrait type, sold at Sotheby's 18 March 1981, is now at Tate Britain.